Positivity Challenge [Day 5]

Final Day!

I am grateful for:

1) Being able to have a renewed sense of confidence and identity, that I can see from both big and small decisions I make – from what philosophy and faith I choose to step into for my life, to what style of clothing I prefer based off of my tastes and own admirations instead of others. 

2) Given blessings so that I may bless my friends.

3) The wonderful people I’ve met in high school and college who have provided me with so much insight and good company to assist in the formulation of who Peter is today.

That is all for now 🙂

The Vicious Cycle only gets Deeper (In a good way)

Long story short, during the last month I had decided to put aside my lens of skepticism temporarily to allow more spiritual facets of Jesus a chance to present itself in hopes that I would learn more about God and his intentions. Frankly, it blew away my mind for reasons I can specify elsewhere and I brought this excitement to the musical praise leader (and pastor of another congregation) currently serving at the church I attend in Santa Cruz. He got super hyped up upon hearing this, and encouraged me to keep the momentum of loving others and staying prayerful going; with the encouragement though, he also cautioned me: “Remember that you’ll still mess up, but don’t focus on the fall even as the cycle of sinful habits will return.”

Positivity Challenge [Day 4]

Today, I am grateful for:

1) Being given the honor to usher in a new graduate student to one of the churches in Santa Cruz, CA and the local Safeway here. I felt so much joy driving him around, introducing him to new people, and learning about his experience so far as he had left Nigeria last Thursday to enter the States for the first time. 

2) The awesome older sister under God, and that she greatly loves me and cares for my development as a person (@ffpaladin).

3) Having an environment where I can pray and meditate to contemplate where my beliefs are at along with my intentions without being forced to rush into thoughtless action. 

The values of a Sports Sedan

This is not going to be a post about car technicalities. And I think Evos are cool, but stay with me!

TLDR: I really like the Subaru WRX STi, and it represents a lot of my ideals. 

If you’ve ever gotten to know me a bit at all, there comes a point eventually when you realize that I have a certain excitement for cars; namely the Subaru Impreza WRX STi models, although since the 2014-2015 production it’ll now only be known as the WRX. To give a quick peek so ya’ll know what exactly I’m talking about, I’ll copy and paste a bunch of images of the models and years I’ve liked:

2005 Subaru Impreza WRX STi

Subaru Impreza WRX STi Hatchback

2015 Subaru WRX Sti

 

 

 

 

 

 

Positivity Challenge [Day 3]

I am grateful for…

1) Having played Eldritch Horror (a board game) with 3 of my buds last night, and simply enjoying it without prejudice.

2) That two of my housemates and friends were so eager to join me in the cleaning crusade of our house.

3) That last night I was able to pen part of a song that could actually be developed on, that didn’t feel like a dead end.

Reflecting on Reflection

Excuse my rusty writing and idea processing.

June 22nd was the last time I wrote anything onto this blog; it’s been almost half a year since I’ve published a post. I began writing with an idea to list out all the things I’ve done, and it was too overwhelming to reflect on them all at once. It came out something like this:

From June to July I’ve worked in a software internship, wrestled with hard leadership questions in the Christian fellowship I partake in, and almost got the 2nd car of my dreams. From July to August I’ve finally achieved my lifelong vision of having an epic Nerf gun fight on the 2nd floor of my church’s office building, but also potentially broke a heart, and unfortunately shifted social groups again… 

Raiden my wallet… still.

Y U DIE SO FASSSST? 😦

Back in the day when the Pizza Hut local to my area still existed, they had a Metal Slug booth that always mesmerized me with its demonstration video. I recall all the while there was an insert coin icon flashing whilst I gazed in awe at the wonderfully created pixel characters, animation, and destruction on screen while my parents waited for our order. The choice between the capsule machine and a chance to go at the visually stimulating arcade was always a challenge.

First Impressions, and pretty impressed.

I never really was a fan of DotA or LoL… during the times it was put in front of me I never really wanted to taste it, and when I attempted to download LoL for my Mac it failed miserably (from the apparently faulty client the official download link gave); it did however succeed in crashing my computer 5-7 times in attempting the install though. That said, it would seem that for our poor Peter here, he would never experience a game with similar mechanics.

That all changed when his good friend Andrew recently spotted a game with mechanics inspired from such titles on the recently expired Humble Indie Bundle (www.humblebundle.com): Awesomenauts, by Ronimo Games. Knowing that Peter enjoys games like Metal Slug and team-based action, Peter’s heart instantly fell for it when experiencing it for the first time.

Anyways, I (Peter) will simply be giving my first impressions and opinions on this game.

Atmosphere:

The glorious title screen.

Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa’s 1950s crime drama film called Rashomon presents the idea, christened the “Rashoman effect”, of how the perception of recollection is rather subjective. For example, in the movie a crime was witnessed by four individuals and was described the event in one of the four mutually contradictory ways presented in the movie. 

My wonderful TA is attempting to use this principle and attempt to enable the Rolemodel project to give each character found within a story a role such as a “victim” or “aggressor”, but also be able to generate a story in which it is told from the character’s point of view. Therefore, should a murder occur but all the characters are considered to be in the role of a “victim”, then even the murderer must be able to describe whatever generated series of events  as though he/she was the victim of the event. 

It’ll be interesting to see how this will play out.

Storyteller (again)

In an earlier post I had mentioned and linked to Daniel Benmergui’s html “game” that demonstrates the basic workings of the Storyteller in development.

In this presentation he explains in the beginning that Storyteller is to actually be considered a puzzle game in which the player attempts to make the story with the given pieces. In each session, there are a series of panels empty, meaning that they are without the characters, their motives, and elements that change the character’s motives (romance, depression, etc). Depending on how you place the elements given in the panels, the game will attempt to make sense and find the most dramatic interpretation of things and then the resulting story is created.

An interesting aspect of Storyteller he explains is why it is not created to be real time and why sound was not included. He speaks of the cons of having something more frame-based and thus have a less amount of dramatic-ness versus a real-time game, and how sound would not fit in because dramatic scores that were created fit for tragedies (as it was apparently the most common event); later on in the presentation Daniel makes a good point saying that many players are not inclined to give the in-game characters empathy and instead finding humor in the various ways the characters react. He clarifies that Storyteller will not become a universal comic tool either.

Recently my friend and I have been learning about the presentation of games and how they are received, and I definitely commend the work Benmergui is putting into Storyteller to dish out what he has envisioned.